Content Marketing: Why you need to create a buyer persona first before publishing anything

Content is a very powerful marketing tool that most businesses misuse due to a lack of strategy. Without a good strategy, it is easy to waste valuable resources (specifically time and effort) into producing content without a clear vision as to where you are heading. This puts us back to the basics. Ask yourself or your client: who are we targeting?

Creating an
audience persona may entail a lot of research and observation, but trust me, it
is worthwhile.

One of the reasons digital marketing has outweighed traditional advertising (that is through print and broadcast media) is that with this platform, everything is quantifiable. Analytics tools provide businesses with an accurate image of who their customers are. In fact, even with Goggle Analytics alone, you can extract data of your audiences’ online behavior, demographics, age, preferred devices and interests. As compared to using status quo as marketing preference, targeting audience with similar or related interests and behavior was found to be more effective in terms of conversion.

Instead of talking to a large audience who may or may not be interested in what you are saying, it is a better use of business resources to speak to a smaller audience who’s genuinely interested and has a higher probability of making a purchase.

By knowing
exactly who’s your audience and what they are looking for, producing content
would be a piece of cake.

What is Buyer Persona in Content Marketing?

Basically,
a “persona” is a fictional character created as a proxy for a target audience.
These audience archetypes may include illustrative pictures and fictional names
making them more tangible to digital marketers. Personas detect similar behavior
patterns that result in commonly held goals.

Buyer persona is a representation of who your customers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and the reasons behind their buying decision. If you are a budding business owner with very limited resources, you would want to allocate your marketing resources in front of an audience who has a specific need for your products and services.

Buyer
personas help businesses understand how to position their products’ features
and benefits. It also helps marketers define the best place of distribution or
access to the products.

Jobs-to-be-done Theory

In this article,
Content Marketing Institute has brought up a very interesting theory which can
be linked to marketing professors Chester Wasson and David McConaughy. The
Jobs-to-be-done Theory suggests that “customers don’t buy products – but rather
a ‘satisfaction bundle’ for solving problems”.

The Jobs-to-be-done
theory is an extremely helpful tool to get a much more useful audience persona
profile for content marketers. It opens a wider set of opportunities for
content marketing stories as it broadens the story and ideally, be able to cover
the entire audience’s journey.

5-step Framework for Applying a Persona to your
Content Marketing

If you are
left with an empty board, thinking of how you can create an accurate persona
for your content marketing, below are 5
actionable steps you can do to define that buyer persona and how you can
market to them.

Define the problem

One common mistake made by businesses is that they use marketing to brag about the benefits of their products and services. But what they fail to look at is to answer this question by their customers: what’s in it for me?

The best
way to stand out versus your competitors is to make your target audience believe
you provide a better solution to their problem. If you can define what keeps
people awake at 3 a.m. and then offer a solution, you have their attention.

With one of
the clients I’ve had who was marketing an online course with a rather broad target
audience (those who are looking to start an online business), we started
building our audience persona by identifying the pain points of each age
generation – Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z. While we found that the common denominator
would be: 1.) looking for a more meaningful career path, 2.) achieve sustainable
income you can do from home, 3. ) gain more flexibility in time, there are
different underlying concerns that lead to their ‘mission’.

Each generation (age range) has specific problems and concerns. Example, for Gen X, the reason they are looking for a more meaningful career path is that some of them are experiencing employment discrimination wherein many recruitment specialists would prefer employing younger professionals.

On the other hand, Gen Y is pressured with caring for aging parents and growing children. They are looking for a better career that would make them feel more financially secured and still have time to “be there” for their growing kids.

Lastly, Gen Z faces the influx of overqualified applicants and the diminishing number of opportunities in the market. There’s just too many degree holders in the market but the number of job openings that matches their qualifications is limited.

Speak your audience’ language

Now that you have a more vivid idea of who your target audience is and what their pain points may be, it’s time to build that connection – learn their language. I’m not talking about learning slang words. It’s about learning what they are interested in and fashion your content surrounding that interest.

Just look
at it this way, would you rather engage with someone who has zero things in
common with you? Of course not! In a room full of people, you would rather talk
to someone who you share common interests with. We are all likely to trust
those who like the same things we like.

The topic “how
to make money online” can be written in so much more effective ways like:

How to make money online and still party after 8

Ways to make money online and still be a hands-on mom

How to start making money online in your 60s

Ask the Right Questions

A business
that just says what they want to say without considering what their audience
wants to hear is like the ill-mannered person at a dinner party talking nonstop
about themselves. No one wants to sit next to that person.

Listen to
what your audience wants and needs to hear. Research and understand your
persona and build a content map based on what questions are asked at each stage
of the buying journey.

Timing is Key

Timing is crucial specially for email marketing campaigns. As much as possible, you want to hold off offers until you have reduced the number of inquiries from people who are not suitable for your products and services.

This is why
I became a fan of the drip campaign. Through this strategy, you are able to
give out ‘teasers’ of what your products or services are exactly, and who is it
for, before dropping the sales bomb. You don’t want an email list that consists
of inactive/unresponsive leads that may or may not report you as spam.

Be Where They Are

The final
stage of content marketing to unlock is to know where your audience hangs out
so that you know where you need to be. Part of researching your persona will
include what social media channels they frequent and what high-profile sites
they turn to on a regular basis.

However, do
remember that each channel has its own nuances and unwritten rules. Do not be
lazy and post the same content on Facebook and Instagram. While a piece of
content can be repurposed, you need to make sure the messaging is using the
right tone and language for each channel or medium.